...do you have any chance whatsoever? Does anyone think a nuclear weapon would work on those gibbering masses of protoplasm? How about shooting one into the vacuum of space, or dropping one into a volcano?

Just curious; I wrote a story about the problem and hope it's believable...

Hard to say; a sloggoth would have to be immune to radiation in order to survive so long (but not necessarily to the other effects of a nuke). Conceivably, a sloggoth could develop a hardened shell that would survive the blast, as anthrax spores do. I don't think the space idea would work: if bactera can evolve to anaerobic, then certainly an Elder God would also. Of course, this is highly unscientific. Perhaps you could kill it by somehow piercing the inner body with a missile or arrow and then detonating it from within.

What if you got a piece of a sloggoth and messed around with their DNA (however that looks like) or you could create a serum and inject it into the roof of its mouths (the one next to his feet) and the antibodies would do its work . . .

Good ideas, peanut and Marlowe (hope you're not sleeping The Big Sleep right now...)

The shoggoth story I wrote used a nuclear weapon - and then a friend of mine wrote a shoggoth story that used very intense flames on a young shoggoth - and now we've gone and sold our collection to Chaosium, and they want a sequel, and so we're exploring the whole shoggoth experience in some detail, coming up with new ways to deal with them...

So. Piercing the outer body and then detonating an explosive from within, and then doing some recombitant gene therapy on one of them. Good suggestions (and if the sequel gets published, and I use your ideas, you'll get some credit in the acknowledgment section, you two).

Thanks.

Did your friend use "Greek Fire" on the shoggoth? It was a weapon in the Middle Ages (probably the equivalent of a nuke in ancient times) and there's a lot of theories as to its actual composition. The fact that water could not extinguish it . . . even back in Byzantine times . . . makes me think that this would be the kind of weapon you would wield against a shoggoth. A destructive, ancient and mysterious (secret formula) weapon like Greek fire . . . you could do something with it . . . could be Shoggoth kryptonite. Haha! Maybe a gift from the Elder Gods to subdue unruly Cthulhu vermin!

Message edited by its author, Nov 13, 2006, 8:58pm.

Well, you can always just keep adding heat until its molecules disassociate. Or keep dumping liquid nitrogen on it until it freezes solid, then take some very small samples and figure out how to take it apart. There's always authenticating yourself to it as one of its long-departed masters, but that way lies sanity loss...

slothman, I think I like your last one best!

According to the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, Shoggoths can be killed with fire, electricity, and firearms, but they regenerate pretty bloody quickly, so you need a lot of firepower, like about a dozen soldiers with M16s to do a minimum amount of damage on them. They also don't like the cold, but this only slows them down, doesn't harm them.

I'm the friend who wrote the story with John Sunseri. We also suggested that strong magnetic fields can contain them. We also had some ideas on what other dimensions do to shoggoths as well!

David

Teamwork, I suspect, is key.

>Teamwork, I suspect, is key.

As in, feeding the other team members to it while you run away? :)

I suppose you could use a variation on the "send a herd of sheep into the dungeon" tactic. In this case, a herd of sheep wearing suicide-bomber vests that go off as soon as the shoggoth engulfs them...

Willie! Good to see you here, man!

(for the rest of you - Mr. Meikle had a story in 'Hardboiled Cthulhu' - a good one)

Dave and I, along with CJ Henderson, are busy plotting out a story where we use your strategy - but instead of using other team members, we're going to feed the things dinosaurs...

Don't give away all our surprised yet John!

Best regards
David

See what happens when I get a couple of beers in me? I spill all the plot details...

I'll be good, David. Promise. I won't even MENTION the thing with the {deleted by several men in dark sunglasses and big guns, who dragged Mr. Sunseri off to their black helicopter}

Spoilers ahead....

...you have been warned!

The Soviets use some spare shoggoths they have lying around in Charles Stross' "A Colder War."

For anyone interested, Chaosium has just announced the collection David Conyers and I wrote at http://catalog.chaosium.com/product_info...

Thanks!

I think the Trollenberg Terror was a shoggoth http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052320/ .

Instead of the mere vacuum of space, how about a black hole? I wouldn't put it past a shoggoth to survive spaghettification, but it should have a hard time coming back.

I would expect it to be ripped apart by the tidal forces, and cooked by the gamma radiation from all the infalling particles. The trick is getting the shoggoth to the black hole...

I see you've grasped the situation thoroughly; of course, shooting it into space generally, as suggested by the original poster, might be tricky in the first place.

Bringing the black hole to the shoggoth also appears to have its problems.

What about trying to build your own version of a Black Hole would that be possible?

Librarianwannabe

Or taking it through The Bermuda Triangle? Or some kind of Lasers like the Yeg Laser or to disrupt its
molecules.

Librarianwannabe

I say we take off, and nuke the shoggoth from orbit. It's the only way to be sure. ;)

Any black hole large enough to do damage to a shoggoth would also be rather difficult to move around and use as a weapon. Moving black holes requires either serious amounts of gravity or dumping enough charged matter into it that the hole develops a charge, and then using electromagnetic fields. (See Larry Niven's short story "The Borderland of Sol" for an example, though that was written before Hawking pointed out that black holes can evaporate; based on current physics, it's likely that a small enough black hole would simply explode and vaporize the shoggoth!)

One of the current hypotheses on the Bermuda Triangle is that there are methane clathrates on the sea floor that let go every now and then, and the massive amounts of bubbles lower the density of the water and cause ships to sink, and the lack of oxygen causes airplane engines to fail. Probably not enough to bother a shoggy.

Ho-ho-hold on, hold on one second. This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it.